My son was born in January, just 15 days after my daughter started walking. We’ve had our hands full, to say the least; but not as full as my overflowing heart. I wouldn’t change a thing.
However, the past six months (has it been that long already?) have been some of the most trying times in my entire life. He was born with bilateral clubfoot. I am thankful it wasn’t something worse, yes. Clubfoot is a congenital physical malformation of the feet, where the feet are turned inward/upward. It’s far from a life threatening ailment (though we did have a pretty scary unrelated hospital stay when he was only days old) and very correctable with consistent treatment. More on that in another post. The relevant part of this story is that his treatment required we temporarily relocate our family to Anchorage to see a specialist for weekly treatment. So, after discovering the severity of his diagnoses at birth, we spent the first two days postpartum recruiting friends in town to help us pack up our lives, and on his third day of life, we got on a plane.
We didn’t expect to need to travel, though I suppose we should have prepared for the possibility. We certainly weren’t planning on needing to live out of a cheap pet-friendly (read: dirty) hotel for three months, while our lovely home which I had nested for my new baby, sat vacant. When we arrived in Anchorage in January, finding a rental car wasn’t that difficult, or all that expensive–at least compared to now. We had a car for the first full week or two, then ultimately decided we were only going to use the car on the one day a week we drove to the hospital for his treatment. That decision saved us a lot of money. Pro tip: Enterprise will pick you up if you’re close enough to their store.
However, by the end of our trip in late March, cars had doubled, if not tripled in price. At first we thought this was because Alaska’s summer tourist season was gearing up. We soon realized it to be a more serious problem of supply and demand (thanks COVID). The last week we reserved a car, we actually rented the last car available. The parking garage was nearly empty when we picked it up.
Fast forward to our trip to visit family in Missouri. We wanted to get back to our “EVs only” pact, and decided to try this hip new app called Turo, since you typically can’t rent EVs from traditional car rental companies. We didn’t have a whole lot of money to spare, and couldn’t justify renting a Tesla for the length of our trip, so we rented a Chevy Bolt from Peoria, Illinois. Road tripping in a Chevy Bolt… that deserves a post of it’s own, too. Learned some real life lessons on the importance of planning out your charging stops on that one… Overall, though, it was a positive experience, and a decision that turned out to be a monumental influence over our next few life steps.
When we returned to Juneau, the rental car shortage was in full swing. We saw an opportunity. We didn’t use our Leaf all that much since we were both teleworking (again, thanks COVID). We already proved to ourselves when we were in Anchorage that we only needed a vehicle once a week, max. We live within walking distance of a grocery store if necessary, and have a motorcycle if someone needs to run solo errands. We live in a tourist town, where rental cars are in high demand, and there’s no near end in sight on this shortage… So we listed our Leaf on Turo.
That turned out to be majorly successful. Our calendar booked to 75% capacity within the first couple weeks. Our Leaf was already paid off, and now it is paying us back. So much so that we considered buying another car. A used, 7-seater Tesla Model S. We did. And we listed that too, at nearly double the price of the Leaf (it IS basically double the car in almost every aspect, you know). Again, majorly successful. We were now seeing earnings that beat what each of our first minimum wage jobs paid us (albeit that was nearly 10 years ago). So we bought another used Model S. A beautiful red one with black interior. Seven seats (five plus the two rear jump seats), panoramic sun roof, the whole nine yards.
But this last time, we made a mistake. When I tried to list the car on Turo after taking possession of the car from the dealer, the car had a mere 103 miles too many to qualify for a new listing. Okay, maybe I should have been more careful with this one, and maybe 130,103 miles is a bit high. But the car was in excellent condition. And, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, Juneau is tiny and it is very hard to rack up the miles on any car in town. So maybe this one will be ours. Most likely we will try to sell it. If we are able to sell it for a profit, we can reinvest the earnings into our business and further expand our portfolio (we have some plans, but I’m not going to share those yet). It’s definitely not what we expected to do with the car, but maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Who knows how sustainable the Turo market will be once the supply chain for big rental car companies catches up. But for the meantime, we’re loving it!
If you’re thinking about renting your car out on Turo, be sure to read our getting started tips to earn more from the start.